Chapter 14 / Britain

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'If people say Uri Geller is a magician, they have simply failed to read the published scientific evidence' (J.B. Hasted, atomic physicist, Professor of Experimental Physics, Birkbeck College, University of London)

However damaging the Johnny Carson experience in LA and the scoffers' consequent merriment had been, it had a zero effect on dissuading a leading BBC television show, David Dimbleby's Talk-In, from giving Uri Geller an enormous fanfare for his first 'official' visit to Britain in November 1973. In a sense, it was the beginning of Geller's journey to what would become home, and what was in some respects his roots. He had been brought up on stories of his father's exploits in the British Army, and enjoyed a traditional British education to GCE level in Cyprus. A decade later, he would settle in Britain, where he has now lived for 15 years.

At times, the live Dimbleby show looked as if it would go the way Carson had a few months previously. It took an agonising period of silence, with nothing at all happening under Geller's concentration before things started to happen in the studio - and the Geller furore described in the opening of this book was unleashed in Britain. Probably the most ringing endorsement of Geller in the immediate aftermath of the Dimbleby show appearance was that of science writer Brian Silcock of the Sunday Times, who the following Sunday, described an encounter with Geller in a taxi 'leaving this initially highly sceptical science correspondent with his mind totally blown.' Geller had caused Silcock's thick office key to bend in the flat of photographer Bryan Wharton's hand, and made a paper knife bend too, so that Silcock and Wharton both saw it continue to bend

'It is utterly impossible to remain sceptical after seeing Uri Geller in action,' Silcock wrote, adding, 'I am convinced that Geller is a telepath too,' after Uri had reproduced pictures the journalist was only thinking, but had not drawn. (Over the years that followed, Silcock reversed his opinion. 'I became convinced in my own mind that it was just a conjuring trick,' he says today. 'I have no idea how the trick was done, but I think there was a process of my natural scepticism reasserting itself. I tend to be of a rather sceptical, downbeat frame of mind, and I somehow got shoved out of it. I don't really understand how that happened, either.')

Perhaps the difference between failure on NBC and success on the BBC was Dimbleby, who, although a sceptic (he is now one of Britain's senior political commentators) had been quite shaken up before the show to see a key he was holding bend under Geller's gaze, and now, if only for the sake of the show going smoothly, was clearly in an encouraging, positive frame of mind.

Also present on the show as resident scientific sceptic was John Taylor, an expert in black holes, who was Professor of Mathematics at King's College, and previously professor of Physics at Rutgers University, New Jersey. The author on anomalous science, Lyall Watson, was also on hand to explain that he had wasted his first experience of Geller by looking all around him for the catch. There were, Watson pronounced, no tricks involved with Uri.

Uri was his usual engaging self, and said he was convinced his abilities were caused by some 'outside power', but that on the other hand, that what he did might equally be powered by the people around him. He went on to do a successful telepathy test, which drew gasps from the audience, wreak havoc with some BBC canteen cutlery, and seemed to cause the hands on Watson's watch to bend under the glass while he was still wearing it.

Today, Dimbleby still clearly recalls the show as a huge success, and explains his view on Geller today - as well as possibly the view of much of the British intelligentsia - with characteristic crispness. 'I saw him doing the metal bending several times with Yale keys, and I can only say what I saw,' Dimbleby says. 'He would take a key and rub it between his first finger and thumb, then put it down and hold his hand over it, and it sort of lifted up towards his hand. I saw it lift up. Once it snapped and once it was just completely bent in half. I am very pragmatic about these things I don't know what the rubbing consisted of and what happened during that process. The conjurer who rubbished him on telly afterwards, Paul Daniels, said everyone had been conned and it was just sleight of hand. But it was clear to me that what wasn't sleight of hand was that the key was on a table or in the palm of his hand, or sometimes being held by the person who had proffered it. I certainly saw the key moving without his actually touching it two or three times. He did telepathy on the programme quite impressively, and I have never seen anyone simulate properly the key bending or forks drooping and seeming to melt in his hand. The odd thing about him is that the little things he does are quite impressive and mysterious, but then ten seconds later, he'll be telling you how he mislaid his camera in South America and had it flown through the air and reform in Tel Aviv or whatever. So today, I am quite cool about the whole thing, and wouldn't endorse him, because a lot of the things he has done are meretricious junk.'

Prof. Taylor was entranced by what he saw in the BBC studio; 'I believe this process. I believe that you actually broke the fork here and now,' he said on the show, in a mixture of delight and bafflement. He took Uri off for testing at King's College, and became an enthusiastic Geller supporter One scientific colleague recalls Taylor having in his eyes the obvious gleam of someone who could see himself getting a Nobel Prize for discovering the new scientific principle behind Uri Geller. Taylor wrote a popular book, Superminds: An Enquiry Into The Paranormal, largely about Geller and dozens of children - known as mini-Gellers - who were discovered in Britain after the Dimbleby show to have similar metal bending abilities. For a few years in Britain, the names Taylor and Geller were almost uttered in one breath. But then Taylor underwent a change of mind on Geller and the entire paranormal field. Another book he published in 1980, Science and the Supernatural, a sort of antimatter version of Superminds, in which he concluded that the evidence for paranormal spoon bending was 'suggestive but certainly not watertight.'

'This is the conclusion I have come to more recently on carefully reconsidering the cases which I had investigated personally and which led me earlier to conclude that the phenomena was truly authentic,' Taylor wrote, adding that when he developed a spoon bending method Randi approved for him, 'In spite of the very friendly atmosphere he [Geller] did not succeed at all. Nor has he returned to be tested again under these (or any other) conditions, in spite of several warm invitations to him to do so. One could suppose that his powers desert him in the presence of sceptics,
but during the test at no time did I or any of my team express any form
of scepticism; I do not think we even thought a harsh thought! As far
as I am concerned, there endeth the saga of Uri Geller; if he is not
prepared to be tested under such conditions his powers can not be
authentic.'

'Taylor's case is a strange one,' comments Prof. Truzzi in Michigan. 'He began by being quite convinced and pursued a new theoretical explanation. When he found his theory would not work, he started questioning everything that he affirmed earlier. Many of us think he got badly burned by his doubting colleagues and largely wrote this negative book to salvage his reputation. His initial description of Geller's spoon bending would seem to preclude any fraud of the sort Randi claims.' Uri shrugs over the Taylor incident and points out, as ever, that he often fails to produce any phenomena at all, and such zeros do not only occur on tense live TV shows. The same had happened once when the quantum physicist Richard Feynman came to see him in Los Angeles out of curiosity, albeit curiosity fuelled by a track record of never having seen an ESP experiment which worked. 'I don't know what happened with John Taylor,' Geller says, 'He just switched off one day and decided that psychokinesis is not paranormal. You never know what happens in the minds of these scientists.' As for what Prof. Taylor thinks a further 20 years later, we cannot know. When I contacted him, his wife said very sweetly he prefers not to talk about it any more. And there endeth, I suppose, the saga of Prof Taylor.

Far less noisily in the background, however, a rather more qualified British academic - qualified in that he is an experimental physicist - was working intensively with Geller in his laboratory in London as well as at his home in Sunningdale, Surrey. John Hasted, who held the chair in Experimental Physics at Birkbeck College, was a most unusual scientist. As well as being a world authority on his speciality, atomic collisions, he was a lifelong lover of folk song, was deeply involved in the London skiffle scene in the fifties and sixties, and was an early anti- activist, who went on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's first Aldermaston march. Hasted was also involved in the first pirate broadcasting in Britain, which was not, as is often thought, done by the offshore pop station, Radio Caroline, but a CND operation in 1958 to 59, in which transmitters were set up on the top of buildings to put out tapes of speeches by Bertrand Russell.

Hasted now lives in St Ives, Cornwall, in a bungalow overlooking the lighthouse Virginia Woolf wrote about in To The Lighthouse. Frail, but still mentally extremely agile, he is still very much into peace and vegetarianism, and reads voraciously everything from new scientific papers to Martin Amis to classics. In the 1970s, Hasted stuck his neck out and, after exhaustive laboratory tests centring on his use of mechanical strain gauges to actually measure the bending in metal, proclaimed Uri Geller genuine. In 1981, his book The Metal Benders, almost 300 pages of close-typed scientific data, speculation and anecdote, set out his experiences with Uri and some of the child spoon benders, along with his theories on the phenomenon. Today, he still believes strongly in paranormal metal bending, although regards the work he did as a comparative failure, because he never managed to work out for certain how the phenomenon happened.

'If people say Uri Geller is a magician, they have simply failed to read the published scientific evidence,' Hasted told me as we sat down to tea on a leaden winter Cornish day looking out to where the Godrevy Island lighthouse would have been had it not been for the mist across the beautiful St Ives Bay. He explained how he had been introduced to Geller by Professor David Bohm, the renowned American-born theoretical physicist, who was interested, like Russell Targ, in the links between eastern mysticism and modern physics. Bohm, a member of the top secret Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb, and a friend of Einstein, was pretty well convinced that Geller was genuine, but Hasted, while fascinated by, as he puts it, 'the nine tenths of science which is unknown' had no experience of the paranormal or psychic phenomena. Hasted, too, was soon becoming convinced.

'I never had to be concerned that I was imagining seeing spoons bend,' he explained, 'because right from the very start I insisted on instruments, quite correctly of course. Randi came to see me at Birkbeck. He was absolutely fanatical about this, but he was not very convincing. It took me about a minute before I saw how he did it, by pre-stressing the spoon. He is back in the days of bending spoons by using force, you see, but he has never attacked my more important experiments, the ones with instruments, because he doesn't understand instruments. I don't think he could have duplicated even the first experiment in Uri's hotel when I first went with Bohm, because I brought my own key, and I had identified it by weighing it very carefully - and I didn't let Uri see it until I popped it on the table. He started to stroke it, and eventually it bent - not a lot, but it bent.'

'I found these professional sceptics to be every bit a much a menace to scientific truth and impartial observation as the worst psychic charlatans,' the professor continued. 'They write that researchers in the parapsychology field are emotionally committed to finding phenomena, yet forget conveniently that they themselves are emotionally committed to finding there are no phenomena. I was often reminded of a saying: "Them as believe nowt, will believe owt."'

'It was a slight shock seeing that key bend,' Hasted continued, 'but there are far worse shocks than that in science. I was just puzzled. I doubt if I would have taken it much further had not Bohm pointed out to me that if that was genuine, we were onto something very important. David Bohm's main contribution to science was the insistence on what are called non-local phenomena in quantum theory, and he was one of the great experts on quantum theory throughout the world, so I took him very seriously indeed.'

Hasted, like Bohm, came to believe that what was happening in the case of Geller and the genuine child metal benders (some were, as might be expected, found when they were videoed secretly to be attention seeking hoaxers) was 'a nonlocal quantum interaction'. In other words, atoms in the metal were being dislocated at a distance by some instantaneously-acting force. What neither man could suggest was what it was in the human brain that could cause such atomic dislocations, but the theory was starting point. 'Of course,' Prof Hasted said, 'Any law that connects such things as quantum theory and brain function would no doubt have to be Sod's Law, and it would be Sod who would get the Nobel Prize.'

The time when Sod most applied to John Hasted's involvement with Uri Geller was when Hasted brought his experimental subject home to Sunningdale. It was there, during and after Geller's visit, that an extraordinary series of poltergeist-type phenomena showed up. The first was within minutes of his arrival, when Hasted observed at the back door of his kitchen, where he was with his late wife, Lynn (who was deeply dismissive about the paranormal) and Geller, an ivory statuette normally in the sitting room, falling vertically from the ceiling to the floor. This was followed by a second object appearing in the air, the key of an unused antique clock which stood next to the statuette. Over the next few weeks, there were countless instances of objects appearing to have travelled through solid walls or from inside containers, often when an increasingly frightened Lynn was on her own. The clock key kept making its own way to the identical spot by the back door, the statuette would be found on its side. Then the clock, which had no pendulum and had not worked for 30 years, started chiming, which caused Lynn to phone Hasted at the laboratory and beg him to come home. That evening, the clock - which has now returned to its dead state and still has pride of place in Hasted's sitting room in Cornwall - chimed continually.

The strange occurrences in the house increased in frequency, culminating in a particularly disturbing one two days before Christmas. The Hasteds happened to have a good local butcher in Sunningdale, and a friend asked them if they would get his Christmas turkey for him. He came round to collect the bird late in the evening, the day before Christmas Eve. When the Hasteds and their friend went into the kitchen to pick the turkey up, something a little alarming had happened, a phenomenon reminiscent in a small way in its grotesque, baffling imagery of those which had afflicted the nuclear physicists at the Livermore Laboratory in the States a few weeks previously. The turkey's liver had apparently extricated itself from inside the still-sealed plastic bag of giblets, and rematerialised outside the unbroken bag, in the middle of a plain white table. There was no trace of a blood smear near it as would have been expected if the liver had moved across the surface.

Dozens of other bizarre physical phenomena were happening to Hasted at work, to his work colleagues and to the Hasteds' friends, but the turkey incident, however, was one too many for Lynn, who threatened to leave Hasted over it, although both she and he suspected that Geller had in some way let loose the avalanche of psychic phenomena through her unwitting co-operation. 'It was a remarkable series of incidents,' Hasted says now. 'It was a hard time for my wife and myself; we nearly fell out. We really had quite serious emotional troubles about it. I wasn't frightened; I can't become frightened for little pieces of metal; they weren't ghosts or anything like that. But she was very scared.'

The phenomena dried up, as these things do, and the Hasteds stayed together. And it moved Hasted's thinking on from puzzling over spoon bending to considering the wider question of teleportation. 'My attitude on this is that when metal bends, atoms move about in the metal, and if enough atoms moved around, then the whole object could jump, and this would be teleportation - which I now believe to be merely another branch of metal bending. In fact teleportation is probably the more fundamental event, and both Uri and some of the children I studied at the time have done it for me under very good conditions indeed. Eventually, this could be a solution of the transport problem. Yes, beam me up Scottie! I think we might get there within 50 or 100 years - except that it will be very dangerous in that your head might come off or something like that. Teleporation from A to B is instantaneous, because it is another demonstration of quantum nonlocality. Nonlocality means the same thing being in two places at once, things not moving, but just appearing, going through walls. That's been my experience.'

Before I left for the train back to London, Hasted took me into his cluttered study, where he keeps the mementoes of his pioneering metal bending work alongside half disembowelled bits of computers and other electronic gadgets. The bent and mangled forks and spoons are carefully marked with little hand-made sticky labels; most are the product of metal benders other than Geller, and the quite grotesque distortions are greater than anything Geller produced. 'There's no doubt,' Hasted said as I photographed him with these mangled old pieces of cutlery, 'That some of the children were real mini-Gellers, and some were more powerful than Uri. I had one, whose parents were Oxford academics, who on one occasion walked through his bedroom wall in front of them. Most of these children, we found, were rather unhappy, and usually had problems with their father, and were closer to their mother - which I believe describes Uri's position. You will find, however, that in adulthood, they are almost all reluctant to talk about what they could do as children, or tell you whether they can still do it, some because they were cheating and are embarrassed, and others because it brings back this tortured time in their past. Uri was unusual in taking a different course, I think, because he wanted to impress, but also to be a good publicist for the cause. That was his whole end object.'

Two interesting postscripts to my interview with John Hasted came in the week after it. With much international phoning and e-mailing, I tracked down two of his child metal benders, one in Wiltshire - the number supplied by her brother in Hong Kong (who asked if I got any explanation from his sister about what happened 20 years ago, to let him know what it was - the other in Canada. Both agonised over being interviewed again, but decided against it. 'It was all perfectly genuine,' one said, 'and please give my best wishes to Professor Hasted. But I wouldn't want my friends and neighbours to know about what happened back then, and have all those accusations about attention seeking starting again.'

The other curious thing was that, when we were discussing teleporatation, Hasted had said that he believed in my lifetime, but not in his, teleporatation would become an established scientific effect. On the Friday of the same week, Nature published a five-page article from professor Anton Zeilinger and other researchers at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, describing the first ever successful verification of quantum teleportation - not quite of Scottie or of an ivory statuette or a turkey liver, but of the electrical charge on a single photon particle two metres across their laboratory. The Innsbruck team were not, as it happened, looking into the possibilities of mind over matter being a quantum effect, but suggested that theirs was the first experimental proof that quantum mechanics might soon be used to transfer information in computers infinitely faster than we can now do by mere electronics.

The Nature article happened to be published within days of another experiment in the USA, this producing the first virtually incontrovertible evidence of mind-power influencing material objects. Physicist Professor Robert Jahn's team at Princeton University documented subjects beating odds of 1,000 billion to one when willing a random number generator to produce specific sequences. A few months later, there was good and bad news for the paranormal from Japan, where the Sony Corporation announced it had proved after seven years research that ESP exists - but closed down its ESP research facility because there did not seem to be any way to turn the knowledge into marketable products. Neither the Princeton team nor that at Sony suggested that a quantum effect was behind their respective discoveries. But at least for the first time, the possibility of an explanation for the Geller effect - that his brain and that of others can cause thoughts, atoms in metal, and entire objects to move around by a quantum teleportation method - began to look howsoever dimly realistic.

One of the key events John Hasted organised almost to show Geller off when he was in England was an informal gathering of high-powered, interested parties in his lab at Birkbeck on a June Saturday in 1974. Among those who came to meet Geller were the chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce Rocket Division, Val Cleaver, Arthur Koestler, the engineer-turned science writer, who later bequeathed £1m to found a chair of parapsychology at Edinburgh University, Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, and a third Arthur, Arthur Ellison, professor of Electrical Engineering at City University, London and a part time researcher into the paranormal. The meeting became famous as the source of an ongoing argument between Arthur C. Clarke and several of the others. When Clarke saw his front door key bend before his eyes, according to Ellison and others present, he exclaimed, 'My God, it's Childhood's End come true.' (a reference to one of his own novels, in which the alien overlord Karellan explained to the human race some centuries hence that the ancient mystics had been right, and science wrong, and such phenomena as poltergeists, telepathy and precognition were real). Clarke then said to Byron Janis, Uri's classical pianist friend, who was also present, 'My God, what is this world coming to?'
'Five or six years later,' Janis related at his apartment in Manhattan, 'Clarke said it hadn't happened at all, and that he had been in a hypnotic state. It pissed me off, because I remembered it so well.' Clarke had indeed turned rather abruptly on Geller. Ten years later, in the forward to a fairly way-out paranormal book of his own, Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, - an accompaniment to a TV series - Clarke urged his readers, a little incongruously, to study Randi's work, and was scathing about Geller. Leaving aside the fact that Randi would be bound to dismiss the whole of Clarke's book on principle, Clarke admitted he had indeed made the comment as reported when his key bent, but said that everyone else's memory of the actual bending process, bar his own, had been at fault, and that Geller had actually manipulated the key.

Professor Ellison remains particularly resolute on this matter. 'Clarke got out Yale key and he put it on top of Hasted's secretary's typewriter,' Ellison recalls. 'We were standing around the desk in the outer office. Clarke put his finger on the key, which was all alone on that flat surface, and said to Geller, "See what you can do with that." I was to one side within a foot of it, Arthur Koestler was a foot away elsewhere, and Geller came up between us and stroked it on the flat back of the typewriter. All of us were watching that key like a hawk, and the end curled up in about a minute. You could rock it to and fro. Our attention was not distracted, we weren't born yesterday, we were all aware of magicians' tricks, and there was nothing else that happened that I haven't mentioned, so there's not the slightest doubt in my mind. If I have seen something I will say so. I will not be short of the courage of admitting if I see things that the general scientists think are impossible. Clarke was amazed at the time, so I was surprised when I saw him on a TV programme that he was very non-committal about Geller. I think he probably feels that if he admits to seeing a paranormal phenomenon, everyone will assume he's going round the bend and will cease taking him seriously.'

Ellison, who has retired like Hasted, lives in suburban splendour in a detached house on a tree-lined avenue in Beckenham, outside London. Somehow, it is not the kind of place you would expect to find either a world renowned scientist, nor a leading light in psychical research, yet Ellison is both. The son of a tailor from Birmingham, his background is in heavy electrical engineering, from which he went into academia in 1958. Ellison is also prominent in the Scientific and Medical Network, an international group of nearly 2,000 doctors and scientists with an interest in spiritual and paranormal matters.

'My rule has always been,' Ellison explained, 'that if ever I talk about anything paranormal in the university common room, then I make jolly sure that the evidence for its truth is about an order of magnitude stronger than anything else in normal science .The standard and the quality of the research in parapsychology is a great deal higher than it is in most subjects. I have had several sharp rows on the radio about the paranormal with people like Richard Dawkins, who is the Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and Lewis Wolpert at the Middlesex School of Medicine. I have discovered the way to deal with Lewis now is to talk about quantum mechanics, the fact that a great many distinguished physicists think that what's out there depends on our consciousness for its meaning in reality. Nobody would say that the fathers of quantum mechanics, like Niels Bohr and the other distinguished members of the Copenhagen group of physicists, were idiots. Even Lewis wouldn't say that. Life just isn't as simple as people like these, who I call naive materialists, love to believe.'

'As for Geller,' Prof Ellison continued, 'I think he is important in that he shows how certain things that some normal scientists consider impossible are not impossible, but as they have been conditioned by their education and training to "normal" reality, they just dismiss it all as conjuring, so that it is not as important to them as it ought to be. If they had the truly open mind of a real scientist they would be very interested in things that don't appear to be obeying what they consider to be the normal laws of nature.'

'Now Randi, of course,' Ellison added with obvious irony, 'Has the benefit of already knowing that all this is impossible, so when finds some way of imitating it by conjuring, he knows that's the way it must have been done. What is unfortunate is when scientists are half blind too, and don't see things, don't do the right experiments, don't do any experiments, because they already know it's impossible.'

Remarkably for a man who is listed in Who's Who as a visiting professor at M.I.T. (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the author of a string of papers and books on highly pragmatic matters, such as the problems of noise and vibration in electric machines, Prof Ellison (DSc Eng., CEng, FIMechE, FIEE, Sen Mem IEEE) goes beyond even quantum theory to explain Uri Geller. It was all rather heady - and fascinating - stuff to hear on a winter's evening in a suburban avenue in Beckenham, from a 79 year-old retired professor emeritus with a Birmingham accent. 'I don't actually think it is Geller who bends the metal,' he said. 'You will no doubt be what I call a naive realist. You think there is no doubt that all these objects are around us, and you have in your mind a model of the physical world, which usually works all right, and so do I much of the time. But I actually think there are not real objects around us, and that is the result of my own experience of the paranormal. I have been to every kind of seance you can imagine, I have had every kind of experience that there is within the paranormal. My boggle threshold is at infinity I think. I have seen an apport arrive in the middle of a seance in a good light, an object that wasn't there before, a rose, a living rose, slowly materialising. I have seen objects floating in the air in a good light. I was once in a seance when the control personality, through the medium in trance, while the light was still on, said, "Hold my hand," so I linked fingers and there was a luminous trumpet kind of painted on the carpet in the middle of a big circle of spiritualists. And I held my hands out, and this trumpet floated up in the air, went round and round my linked hands half a dozen times, before it floated back down to the carpet again. I have seen and made notes on some 30 full-scale materialisations, so you'll understand that I didn't turn a hair at seeing a key bent.'

Psychism, Ellison added, giving some to Uri's insistence that since the age of three that he has no real idea of how he does what he does, occurs at an unconscious level, where people have no control over it, and also cannot be switched on like a tap. He also considers it sometimes occurs in people who do not expect it when they experience what some psychiatrists term a 'temporary suspension of disbelief'.

The intriguing thing about Arthur Ellison when he discusses Uri is that he is in many ways quite sharp about him, and is far from an acolyte, yet still supports him. Ellison had wanted to study Geller back in 1973, but was beaten to it by Hasted and Taylor. 'Geller did invite me out to his house, once, when, I think, he really wanted this legal document to help him, an affidavit about the Arthur C. Clarke business. He promised to invite the family to see a bit of metal bending, but he never did. He is most unreliable. I slightly suspect he sometimes tells stories that aren't quite accurate, and occasionally makes promises that he can't keep. I also can't swear that he doesn't at some times use stage magicianship. If anyone is paid as much as he is and it doesn't work one evening, I imagine it's a terrible temptation to fake it a bit, if not for the self respect, then at least for your money, to give them what they paid for. That showmanship thing has done quite a lot to damage the subject. But the great thing with Uri is that he can get members of the audience, with no extra grind, to bend their own keys. Now that's fantastic, and I applaud Uri for it, because it's not Uri doing it; they are doing it themselves. It's that temporary suspension of disbelief.'

So much about Uri's 1973 and 1974 trips to Britain was focused on a solemn striving for scientific acceptance that it is easy to forget that he was simultaneously a creature of showbusiness, concerned more than anything else with maintaining a rock star existence. But far from abandoning his flashy showbusiness career to science, Geller was managing inconguously to combine the two. In the midst of the scientific controversy in Britain, he found time to make and promote his first record, called Uri Geller, for which he wrote and voiced the vaguely spacey words and theme of universal love, Byron Janis wrote the music, and an arranger who had done work with The Beatles set the finishing touches. The record was a success, and Geller was called upon to record it in Italian, French and Japanese. 'It was recently re-released in Japan,' Uri says with considerable pride, 'And has also been voted the worst cover award in Australia, and, very was discussed a little while ago on ABC TV's Good Morning America, where it was mentioned as the third or fourth worst record in the world.'

Uri was also concentrating as much effort as he could muster while in Britain on simply having fun - with bizarre consequences in one case, as he describes. 'While I was in London, I went to a casino, something I'd only done once since the time in Italy, when I did well. In the States, I went to Las Vegas with Yasha and Shipi, and it was a disaster. We lost every penny and ended up sleeping in the car. But in London, and I either predicted where the roulette ball would fall or made it fall onto the number that I had chosen - I can't remember which - and I won £17,000. That was a lot of money for me, and I was sitting feeling happy in the back of this Daimler with my black leather jacket stuffed with £17,000 in two pockets. And as we were driving, I heard a voice in my head, terribly loud, shouting at me and saying, "Why did you do it?" I got so scared that I grabbed the driver. I actually opened the glass partition between us and I started shaking him. He stopped the car, and the door opened as if an invisible hand had opened it, and I felt as if I was thrown out of the car, with a massive weight on my chest and body, pressing me right into the ground. It lasted maybe 15 seconds, and I threw out the money on the on the hard shoulder of the M4, £17,000, all bundled up in rubber bands. It was such a relief. I never gambled again after that.'

'Maybe it was me,' Uri speculates of this strange incident, the impact of which is marred only by his failure subsequently to track down the Daimler driver as a witness. (The incident was never reported either by Geller or anyone finding the money, leaving the obvious possibility that the driver raced back to the same spot later to pick the precious bundle up.) 'Maybe it was my inner conflict, telling me never to do it, and it translated it in such a way that it scared me, and it was me building an energy force around me being able to psychkinetically open the door of the car,' he theorises. 'I will never know those things. I never know what is going to happen to me tomorrow. The mystery to me is why am I allowed to fly in an airplane and open maps and tell big mining companies where to drill and be paid for it, but I cannot try to win the lottery or go into a casino. I don't understand it.'